by Steve Livingston on October 4, 2011
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Do you want to take your business onto its next stage of growth? Do you need to find some senior talent to help you do this?
We are partnering with AngelNews for its latest Pitching for Management event in Manchester on 12th October. This will be the perfect event for exciting businesses to find senior people to help them build their teams at no cash cost and for executives to identify interesting early stage businesses that would value their expertise.
Pitching for Management is a live event series which runs in 18 cities across the UK. It will be held at Brown Shipley’s offices in Spinningfields from 4.00pm to 7.30pm. As well as the pitches there are plenty of networking opportunities at the event and canapés and drinks will be served during the evening.
The Pitching for Management concept is simple. Make a short pitch to an audience of senior executives who have come to see if they can offer their services to help you.
These executives are willing to work for sweat equity, bonuses, commissions and/or share options. So pitching companies do not need to pay high salaries until they are delivering the results you require.
You can read all about Pitching for Management at www.pitching4management.com.
We are expecting between 30 – 50 relevant senior executives will attend the event. Past events in the series have shown that pitching companies have a good chance of finding someone that suits.
AngelNews is holding a competition for the best pitch of this series of Pitching for Management. The winning pitch at the Manchester event will go through to the final in Bristol on 13th December. The winner of the final will receive a £2,000 cheque.
To find out more about this opportunity, please call Caroline Sage at AngelNews on 01761 452 248 or email her on caroline[at]angelnews.co[dot]uk or contact me.
You can find booking details here.
Hopefully see you there!
by Steve Livingston on June 7, 2011
Around 100 attendees packed How-Do’s recent Creative Industries Business Forum held at the stylish The Hive in Manchester.
Liane Grimshaw (former managing partner at Amaze) stole the show for me with a passionate summary of the key learning points that have framed her entrepreneurial journey so far. Here’s my summary from my notes:
1. Know when to say “No” – the more you can narrow your focus, the more you can become an expert and dominate a niche. Once you can dominate a niche and develop your own unique approach, the more price becomes an irrelevance.
2. Practice what you preach – why is it, she questioned, that marketing agencies have some of the worst and most unimaginative websites? Websites and literature that simply lists services…… Agencies frequently use words like “innovation” and “creativity” and then deploy “pedestrian” techniques for marketing their own services and solutions! You need to practice what you preach every day. You can’t have an away-day to create a strategy document and then expect this to magically change the agency culture overnight! The culture comes from the way you and your people act every day.
3. Trust your gut - this applies to selecting your people, strategy and interpreting your results. Probationary periods for recruiting new staff should be observed and people moved on if they do not fit into the company culture – shirking these difficult decisions early on often can develop into much bigger problems further down the line. Your intuition is rarely wrong.
4. Size does matter - there are pros and cons to being a small agency and likewise for larger agencies. Being smaller agency allows for greater agility, speed of decision-making and willingness to take more risks in terms of creative briefs. As agencies grow, the pressure to become more “corporate” in approach can result in employees trusting their own initiative less and starting to “lean on company processes”. Many large agencies could learn a thing or two from smaller agencies e.g. using smaller teams within an organization.
5. If you don’t want to get up in the morning, change it or let go – life’s too short. It may seem like a difficult decision at the time but trusting your gut instinct and making changes or walking away completely to start again may be the best decision for the longer term.
In the discussion groups that followed, these themes kept cropping up repeatedly. These principles can be applied to any business. Home truths – well said. Thanks Liane.
Do you want to take your business onto its next stage of growth? Do you need to find some senior talent to help you do this?
